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PALGRAVE POLITICS OF
IDENTITY AND CITIZENSHIP

Religiosity and
Recognition
Multiculturalism and
British Converts to Islam
Thomas Sealy
Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series

Series Editors
Varun Uberoi, Brunel University London, London, UK
Nasar Meer, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
Tariq Modood, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
The politics of identity and citizenship has assumed increasing impor-
tance as our polities have become significantly more culturally, ethnically
and religiously diverse. Different types of scholars, including philoso-
phers, sociologists, political scientists and historians make contributions
to this field and this series showcases a variety of innovative contribu-
tions to it. Focusing on a range of different countries, and utilizing the
insights of different disciplines, the series helps to illuminate an increas-
ingly controversial area of research and titles in it will be of interest to
a number of audiences including scholars, students and other interested
individuals.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14670
 Thomas Sealy

Religiosity
and Recognition
Multiculturalism and British Converts
to Islam
Thomas Sealy
University of Bristol
Bristol, UK

Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series

ISBN 978-3-030-75126-5 ISBN 978-3-030-75127-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75127-2

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
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 Acknowledgements

I am first and foremost indebted to the people who shared their stories,
including their joys and struggles, hopes and frustrations. Not only
would this book not have happened or been as rich without their interest,
willingness and generosity, these stories have also enriched my own
perspectives and modes of thought and feeling. For this, I am indebted
indeed.
I am extremely grateful to Professor Tariq Modood and Professor
Therese O’Toole for their support, encouragement, probing, prodding
and not least patience as my Ph.D. supervisors when the research that
forms the basis of this book was done. I am especially grateful to Tariq
Modood, who I have continued to learn a great deal from as a Research
Associate during the time I was developing the arguments for and writing
this book.
I owe a large debt of gratitude to Rashid Ansari, without whose help
and generosity this would have been a far more difficult project to get
going. I am also indebted to those who let me explain my research
to groups they run, put me in touch with people, and disseminated
my information, and hope I am forgiven for not naming names in

v
vi Acknowledgements

the interest of preserving the confidentiality of those who subsequently

responded and whose words appear throughout.
I am grateful to colleagues who provided a friendly, supportive and
enjoyable working environment. Also to those who have in different
capacities and ways and at different times read, discussed, grilled me on,
or simply listened to the ideas and issues explored in these chapters. In
this, I owe special thanks to Magda Mogilnicka, Kieran Flanagan, Jon
Fox, Kim Knott, Katya Braginskaia, Zoe Sanderson and Rosie Nelson.
Special thanks are also due to Yasmin Soysal and Mike Roper. Without
their encouragement and enthusiasm for my ideas at their earliest stage,
this may never have happened.
Finally, my family, whose support has come in a very different guise,
but one just as important. It is grounding and reassuring to have the
support of those with whom I don’t have discussions about what I read,
write and think and how well the arguments and contents of this book
fit and follow, but rather are just interested in how I’m doing. In this vein
Sophie, and in his own way George, deserve a special mention.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Multiculturalism and Religion 1

Secular Britain 4
Christian Britain 6
Plural Britain 7
Multiculturalism and Religion 8
Multiculturalism and Secular Sociology 10
Methodology 13
Methodology and Identity 14
The Study 18
Reflexivity 18
References 21
2 Converts in Multicultural Context 27
Converts to Islam in Britain: Historical Overview 28
The Contemporary Picture 31
Born Muslims in Multifaith Britain 36
Born Muslims and Converts in Contemporary Britain 38
References 45

vii
viii Contents

3 Multiculturalism and the Multi-Religious Challenge 49

Multiculturalism’s Challenge: Difference
and Recognition 50
Multiculturalism Challenged 53
‘Everyday’ Multicultural Identities 53
Multiculturalism as a Theological Principle 57
Difference: Substantive and Liberative 58
Hospitality 61
Hospitality in Islam 64
Hospitality and Recognition: Common and Uncommon
Ground 66
References 70
4 Resituating Religiosity 75
Theological Reflections 79
Religiosity and Religion 84
The Heart of the Matter 85
A Fusion Between Horizons of Past and Present 88
Of Eggs and Atheism 90
Religiosity Past and Future: Being and Becoming 94
Ontological Responsibility 96
References 97
5 Religion, Culture and the Stranger 101
The Religion-Culture Divide: Deculturation:
A Problematic 102
Reculturaltion: Assimilation and Exclusion 103
Euro-Islam, European Islam 107
The Stranger 116
The Stranger (Re)considered 117
Simmel’s Stranger 119
References 121
6 Being Made Strange: Dislocated, Functionalised
and Refused 125
On Estrangement 127
A Continuum of Estrangement 130
 Contents ix

Estrangement and Islamophobia 132

The ‘Immigrant’ Experience 134
From Stranger Functionalised to Stranger Refused 139
References 144
7 Unusual Multicultural Subjects: On Being British,
on Being Muslim 147
The Religiosity of the Stranger 149
Religiosity and Belonging in Britain 151
Religiosity and Born Muslims 156
Religion: Elastic and Tactical 165
References 167
8 Islamophobia and Religiosity: Religion, ‘Race’
and Ethnicity 169
Islamophobia and Convert Identities 174
Decategorisation in Relation to Non-Muslims 178
Decategorisation in Relation to Muslims 181
Five tests for Islamophobia 187
References 190
9 Hospitable Multiculturalism 195
When is Recognition not Recognition? 198
Whither Multiculturalism? 205
Hospitality and Recognition: Judgement 207
Hospitality and Recognition: Dialogue 209
Secularity and Pluralism 211
Dialogue and the Challenges of Translation 214
References 217
10 Conclusion 221
References 229

Index 231
 1
Introduction: Multiculturalism and Religion

A few years ago I was at a workshop to mark the launch of a secularism-

religion study group. Senior academic staff gave presentations and we
were all encouraged to think about where we saw overlaps and comple-
mentarity between our thinking and that of other participants. Only one
presentation took an explicitly religious or theological angle, an expo-
sition of Rowan Williams’s article ‘Beyond Liberalism’ (2001). In this
article, Williams sets out a critique of both the politics of liberalism and
the politics of identity for being politics that disconnect people from
one another through a too heavy emphasis on individualism, in the case
of the former, and on groupism, in the case of the latter. Moreover,
he suggests that emerging from the impasse created by the two butting
heads, ‘the theological question begins to come into focus’ as a way of
conceiving of common life (Williams, 2001: 70). For multiculturalists
and secularists alike in the room, including those who do not overly
subscribe to either position in a strong sense, the presentation was greeted
not with any hostility but with the mild indifference of ‘so what?’ ‘Why
is it necessary to speak in such terms?’; something, in other words, had
been lost in translation.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
T. Sealy, Religiosity and Recognition, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75127-2_1
2 T. Sealy

In a way, this book is a response to this moment. Despite its fleet-

ingness, it has remained with me and has led to the ‘conversation’ that
this book seeks to engage, namely a creative encounter between multi-
culturalism and political theology. This is the theoretical substance of
the book. One reason this instance stuck with me was that it resonated
with empirical work I had recently finished and was analysing. I had
been interviewing converts to Islam and increasingly discovering that the
literature I was reading was inadequate to the task of understanding the
stories I was hearing because of a lack of ‘musicality’ when it came to reli-
gion. A particular issue in this sense was that religion was often collapsed
into culture or ethnicity such that it lost any distinctness, and vitality, of
its own.
The central theme of this book is thus multiculturalism and religious
identities, and a key issue is a tension between the cultural and the reli-
gious. Looking in-depth at the case of converts to Islam shines an acute
light on these issues. Empirically this stems from a discursive divide
between culture and religion in their narratives as they grapple with
issues around identity and belonging in relation to ‘majority society’,
their family and friends, and born Muslim communities, although such
a discursive religion-culture divide is by no means exclusive to converts.
Conceptually it stems from relating this to multiculturalism’s core iden-
tity conceptualisation of ethno-religious, from which multiculturalism’s
other key terms of difference and recognition hinge. The question that
arises out of the engagement of these conceptual and empirical positions
becomes ‘what is missing?’ Arising from the narratives I was listening
to, and present also in the instance I opened this introduction with, the
answer, it turned out, was in fact religion and religious faith.
To address the question of what is missing, and how and why this
is significant, the discussion in the book is principally oriented towards
multiculturalism and the multiculturalist thinking of what has been
called the ‘Bristol School’ of multiculturalism (Levey, 2019), which has
become the dominant theoretical form of multiculturalism in Britain.
Multiculturalism in Britain, in this theoretical variant, has been centrally
concerned with Muslims in Britain for some three decades, yet consid-
eration of the identities and belonging of converts provokes questions
which do not so obviously square with some of its core concepts. One
 1 Introduction: Multiculturalism and Religion 3

of the reasons for this relates to religion, or more specifically what will
be referred to throughout this book as religiosity (Chapter 4). One of
the central lines of argument pursued in this book is that multicultur-
alism, despite much talk of religion and a religion-friendly orientation,
neglects the religious qua religious and this has important implications
for its theorising and conceptual tools. The book, therefore, is principally
concerned with analytically foregrounding religion, or more precisely
religiosity (as a mode of being) in order to address the issues that begin
to arise.
To think religiosity ‘into’ multiculturalism is an important endeavour
but one that requires serious theoretical engagement—it can’t be added
as simply as ‘and that too’. This may sound a strange argument, multi-
culturalism in Britain has, after all, been centrally concerned with
religious and ethnic minorities, most obviously and expansively Islam
and Muslims. Yet here, as will be outlined in Chapter 3, religion has
served as a proxy for ethnicity and is conflated with it in such a way as
to render it analytically subordinate (see also Mitchell, 2006). This book
poses the question of what happens if we, not reverse this, for good soci-
ological reasons this would be the wrong way to go about things, but
rather foreground religiosity in line with multiculturalism’s own terms of
reference.
This is not to say that the book rejects many of multiculturalism’s
positions as a result; it does not. It is to say that by foregrounding the
religious, things look importantly different and that, on its own terms,
multiculturalism requires opening up in this regard. This is where polit-
ical theology comes into the picture. It is, in this sense, an exercise in
shifting a multiculturalists’ indifference to the religious towards a form
of multicultural listening, to appropriate the basis of Luke Bretherton’s
political theology, and who forms the main interlocutor in this regard
for the book.
This book then is about reading the religious into multiculturalism
and draws on the case of converts to Islam in Britain in order to begin
this task. This is particularly salient as it appears that numbers of people
converting to Islam in a political and social climate that appears uncon-
ducive to such a phenomenon are rising. The increasing presence of
Muslims and Islam, whether actual (that is, in demographic terms),
4 T. Sealy

cultural (in terms of significance in the social and cultural life of Britain),
or imagined (often with undertones of fear) makes such a phenomenon
something of a puzzle.
At this stage, it will be an important first step to flesh out some contex-
tual details in order to situate a number of the currents that will move in
and out of the chapters that follow and that will lap against each other.
The following sections of this introduction present ‘Britain three ways’
and elaborate on three dimensions of the religious landscape of Britain:
Britain as secular, as Christian, and as plural (Weller, 2009). In so doing,
overlaps between the three will be highlighted, sociological implications
raised and the picture of multiculturalism central to the book begin to
emerge.

Secular Britain
In what ways is Britain secular, and with what implications for the
concerns of this book? We can begin an answer to this question along
the lines of seeing secularity in two ways: namely, as the decline of reli-
gious beliefs and practice in modern societies and as the privatisation of
religion (see, for example, Casanova, 1994; Taylor, 2009, who produce
distinct but overlapping schemas).
The first dimension, the decline of religious beliefs and practices, is a
complex and contested area in which the definition of religion, religious
and beliefs (amongst others) are contested, but it is fair to say that on a
variety of significant measures religious belief and belonging appear to be
declining; a British Social Attitudes survey found that as of 2018 52%
of people in Britain said they did not belong to a religion and reflected
increasingly secularist attitudes (BSA 36, 2019; see also census figures;
Brierley, 2017; Bruce, 2013; Davie, 2015; CofE, 2018; for a couple of
important examples of the contested concepts, see Heelas & Woodhead,
2005; Lee, 2014; Voas & Bruce, 2007). Religious belief and belonging
are then becoming an increasingly minority position in general.
Under the privatisation of religion, we can notice two related aspects
(Casanova treats these as distinct dimensions). The first is that reli-
gious belief and practice is seen as something subjective and personal.
 1 Introduction: Multiculturalism and Religion 5

It is privatised and individualised and increasingly reflects what Charles

Taylor has referred to as a post-Durkheimian dispensation, where the
idea of adhering to a religious path that does not move or inspire you is
seen as increasingly wrong and even absurd (2007a: 489).
The second points to how religion is increasingly confined to the
private sphere, to the individual, the home, or a religious place of
worship. It is, as a result, largely contained in these private spaces and
more absent in the public sphere. That is to say, secular authorities
and institutions—political, cultural, educational, economic and so on—
provide the norms and principles in which we act and interact. This
social and political ‘order’ has a profound effect on a further sense
of secularity that Charles Taylor refers to as ‘the conditions of belief ’
(Taylor, 2007a: 3), or elsewhere as our ‘social imaginary’ (Taylor, 2007b).
Taylor suggests that we live in a ‘secular age’, distinct from previous eras
in being characterised by a situation where belief in God, rather than
being ‘unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic’ is now but ‘one option
among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace’ (ibid.). Along
these lines we might turn again to the British Social Attitudes survey
(BSA 36, 2019), which found that attitudes towards public religion are
largely and increasingly negative; for example, over a third of people
(35%) say they think religious organisations have too much power and
almost two-thirds (63%) say they agree that religion brings more conflict
than peace. Social hostilities involving religion have also been increasing
in recent years.1 Not only then is so-called non-belief, and certainly non-
belonging, increasing but attitudes to religion, at least in a public sense,
are largely negative.
A further point as a result of these combined privatisation processes
of individualisation and differentiation that is relevant for the argu-
ments of this book is that religion becomes depoliticised; that is, religion
becomes increasingly shorn of its political content and public polit-
ical role. When it comes to political secularism, two types are often
distinguished. One is a less generous secularism that represents a partic-
ular political and ideological programme where the public sphere and

1 http://www.globalreligiousfutures.org/countries/united-kingdom/religious_restrictions#/?region_
name=Europe&restrictions_year=2016.
6 T. Sealy

even public space more generally are denuded of religion. The other is
a more generous secularism, where religion and state are separate but
where connections between the state and religious organisations are not
precluded. This basic difference in modes of secularism have been vari-
ously conceived and rendered but we can find these kinds of ideas in,
for example, Williams’ (2006) programmatic secularism and procedural
secularism or Modood’s (2010) distinction between radical secularism,
of which France provides an example, and moderate secularism, of which
Britain provides an example. While Britain’s model of secularism is very
much of the moderate kind, in the responses to the BSA survey above
there are hints of the other kind in general attitudes towards religion and
publicly religious people. Grace Davie has commented of Britain that in
a largely secularised society: ‘Taking faith seriously is becoming, increas-
ingly, the exception rather than the norm’ (2015: 63). There is, thus, a
way in which religious identities and religiosity in a public sense is an
increasingly difficult position to be understood or gain a hearing.

Christian Britain
If these ways in which Britain is secular paint a dim picture for Chris-
tianity in Britain, and especially for the large churches, in what ways
is Britain still Christian? Our lives are in many ways patterned by
Christianity: the calendar, holidays and so on. The Church still plays
a significant role, even if increasingly symbolic and ‘vicarious’ (Davie,
2015). It has also been argued, more profoundly, that Christianity, even
if shorn of religious language and meaning, also provides our moral and
ethical frameworks. It has been suggested, for instance, that secularism
is but ‘the latest expression of the Christian religion… [it is] Christian
ethics shorn of its doctrine’ (Smith, 2008: 2) and remains so even if
the churches are emptying and connections largely forgotten (Holland,
2019). In this reading, even as Christianity has declined, culture, morals
and values are suffused with a Christian outlook. This dimension of
Britain will become important in Chapters 5 to 8, which will explore an
argument that converts ‘protestantise’ Islam, and, in so doing, necessarily
 1 Introduction: Multiculturalism and Religion 7

exclude born Muslims, something which points as much to Britain’s

colonial past and current racialised society as to its Christian heritage.

Plural Britain
As much as Britain might or might not be Christian, it is also plural,
multicultural and multireligious. Of course, Britain has always been reli-
giously plural, although historically this has generally referred to plurality
within Christianity as well as Jews. The rise of so-called ‘nones’, ‘fresh
expressions’ and alternative, ‘unchurched’ spiritualities are contemporary
features of this plurality, yet it is perhaps partly because of Christianity
becoming to a certain extent ‘invisible’ in the ways just mentioned that it
is the plurality of non-Christian faiths that have in recent decades forced
debates about religion back onto the agenda, of politicians and scholars
alike. Owing to Britain’s former empire, there has been a long history of
people of different faiths coming to Britain and more settled communi-
ties can be traced back to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Yet, prior to the Second World War and post-war migration patterns,
these religious minorities were largely absent from public awareness. This
was to change from the 1950s, since when Britain has seen a growth in
extra-Christian religious diversity, notably Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs,
with the Muslim population being the largest of these (5%+ of the total
UK population). As well as openings and the ease of contact with and
learning from born Muslims, Britain as multireligious provides its own
contextual challenges for converts (Chapters 2 and 5).
Although Hindus, Sikhs, Jews and Christians have all been the subject
of notable legal cases and debates about public religion, the accommo-
dation of Muslims has come to be the dominant issue in relation to
multiculturalism. The key event here was the Rushdie affair of 1989.2
It has in fact been remarked that multiculturalism in Britain ‘properly

2 We might also note that coming the same year as the initial l ’affaire du foulard in France,
and of course the issue of the inclusion of Muslims and Islam has become a wider European
concern.
8 T. Sealy

t[ook] off with the Rushdie affair’ (Modood, 2016: 483), and, more-
over, that this also marked ‘the beginning of the end of [the] illusion of
religion’s insignificance’ (Knott, 2012). Groups and controversies previ-
ously defined in terms of ‘race’ or foreignness came to be redefined as
well as self-define in terms of religion. Whereas Britain’s Muslim popu-
lation had initially been seen through the lens of ‘race’ in the 1950s and
1960s, this increasingly moved to ‘ethnicity’ in the 1980s and 1990s,
and since the turn of the twenty-first century a further discursive and
policy shift has gradually come to increasingly define them through
‘religion’ (Grillo, 2010). Multiculturalism then is bound up with the
relationship between religion and politics. Furthermore, since the first
few years of the twenty-first century, and in particular beginning with
the 9/11 New York and 7/7 London terrorist attacks, religion seen
as a problem has become highly politicised and emerged through the
securitisation of Islam as a result of concerns over violent (and more
recently non-violent) extremism. Thus, the politicisation of religion is
directly related to its perceived predilection for intolerance and violence,
in this case something that is levied at Islam in particular. Historical
processes are complex, but this is one related aspect of how we can see
the professed need for depoliticised religion as a supposed lesson from
history (although see Cavanaugh, 2009; Martin, 2006 [1997]).
Against this background of Britain three ways, the convert emerges as
a controversial public and political figure, his or her conversion is often
portrayed as a kind of cultural or political betrayal (for media representa-
tions see Sealy, 2017; Spoliar & van den Brandt, 2020). This can further
be seen in issues converts face in acceptance from Muslim communities,
where their motivations and identities may also be questioned.

Multiculturalism and Religion

If the above sketched something of the broader picture with regard to
attitudes to religion and politics, for the more theoretical concerns of
this book, we can point to how religion is depoliticised conceptually
by multiculturalism. On this, we can draw attention to its basis in a
socio-political conception of identity, captured in multiculturalism’s core
 1 Introduction: Multiculturalism and Religion 9

identity concept of ethno-religious. This will be outlined in more detail

in Chapter 3, and echo through subsequent chapters, but here we can
briefly note that religion in this formulation elides the religious, which
becomes something of a proxy for ethnicity. The purpose of this book is
not to challenge this as such but rather to point to its effects for religious
qua religious identities. This is something that converts to Islam provide a
particularly stark example of, and can thus shine an acute light on multi-
culturalism’s limitations and blind spots in this regard when it comes to
public religion and religious minorities. It is this lack of capacity that this
book seeks to address.
A further aspect of religion’s depoliticisation relates to another of
multiculturalism’s core concepts, that of recognition. Again, this will be
discussed in further detail in the chapters of the book (beginning in
Chapter 3), but we can note here something of this which also expands
our contextual sketch begun above. In policy terms, the way in which
religion is ‘recognised’ is through partnerships with the state on various
aspects of welfare and service provision. Since the 1980s, faith-based
organisations have played an increasing role as part of the growing
plurality and competition among service providers in the ‘third sector’.
This gained prominence in the 2000s under New Labour and then
the so-called ‘Big Society’ under the Coalition government. Yet, despite
these state-religion connections, questions remain about what is being
recognised. Conditions and choices that revolve around such partner-
ships can dilute anything specifically religious and constrain more critical
engagement on religious grounds from the faith group ‘partners’ (a point
expanded in Chapter 9). This is not, however, to argue for a ‘religionisa-
tion of politics’ (Ivanescu, 2010), as some staunch secularists might fear,
but rather to allow for the ‘fullness’ (Taylor, 2007a) of people in polit-
ical life. This book is concerned with how multiculturalism, despite its
religion-friendliness, fails to account for this kind of depoliticisation and
how it too limits this ‘fullness’. This book, therefore, takes up multicul-
turalism’s own secularist lens and concepts in order to ask questions of
it: what does it miss? With what effects for understanding identity and
social relations? In response to these questions it introduces the notion of
10 T. Sealy

hospitality from political theology as a way of interrogating multicultur-

alism’s concepts of ethno-religious, difference and recognition (initially
in Chapter 3).

Multiculturalism and Secular Sociology

In many ways this secular lens is perhaps unsurprising and reflects some-
thing resonant more widely in the literature around multiculturalism and
religious minorities, along also with that of religious conversion, and
something that permeates through sociology (even it might be noted the
sociology of religion): sociology is a thoroughly secular discipline.
Religion and religious issues are usually framed as ‘a problem’ in
academic as well as political frames (Davie, 2015: 228) and theology is
likewise most often ‘mentioned in a pejorative sense’ and set in an oppo-
sitional binary to everyday or lived religion (Helmer, 2012: 230), or more
commonly is simply ignored by social and political theorists (Billingham
& Chaplin, 2020). Linda Woodhead makes the point that ‘the origins
of secularisation theory are coterminous with sociology itself ’3 and in
the introduction to an edited collection exploring what sociology might
have to say about spirituality in the twenty-first century, one of the
editors noted that while ‘spirituality signifies an indispensable dimen-
sion of what it is to be human …[,] sociology tends to hunt for religion
as a dead entity not as a living enterprise’ (Flanagan,4 2007: 1). More-
over, where religion is approached as living, it is as a more purely social
phenomenon, where religious identity is seen in material and performa-
tive terms, as practice, and where faith or belief are generally eschewed
unless they align neatly with practice, an approach common among
‘everyday’ approaches (Day, 2011; McGuire, 2008). The theologian John
Milbank (2006 [1990]), in a wide-ranging work engaging theology and

3 See: https://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/podcast/podcast-linda-woodhead-on-the-secularis
ation-thesis/.
4 Flanagan is a rare example of a sociologist bridging with theology throughout his work.
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satire which takes an hour to get out of its sheath, or the peculiarly
masculine type of wit which the owner—
“Beareth not about,
As if afraid to use it out,
Except on holidays or so,
As men their best apparel do.”
Her logic—if by happy circumstance she has really trained her
mind to work logically—will not lose the famous feminine faculty for
springing to the top of the stairs while the man is steadily walking up
the steps, because she has acquired the power of recognizing
whether she be on the right landing or the wrong.
Regarding the rhetorical faculties of women, I may first remark
that, by a well-known law of acoustics, a female voice will, if equally
strong, reach further and be audible more clearly at a distance than
that of a man; and, for some kinds of eloquence, at all events, its
softer and purer tones will probably find their way most easily to the
heart. What her actual powers of oratory may be is one of the
problems of the future; but the experience of feminine public
speaking during the last few years seems to point to a curious but
not inexplicable fact,—namely, that, given the same ideas, a woman
will generally express them more easily than a man, at least than an
Englishman. This gift of facile and appropriate expression is
obviously one dependent on a special faculty of the brain (the loss of
which constitutes aphasia), and is very variously distributed among
races, and also, I think, between the sexes. Oratory, which is
dependent upon it for its machinery, as a pianist on his fingering, is
proverbially rare among men of our nation, though, when it does
exist, it seems to reach sometimes to the climax of power and
grandeur. Englishwomen, on the contrary (so far as we yet may
guess), possess more often the ready-wordedness, the fluency and
verve of speech, of the Celt or the Italian. Either the feminine
nervous temperament is favorable to this faculty, or (as I would
rather imagine to be the case) the root of the difference lies in the
region of sentiment, and women speak more fluently because they
are more apt to be carried away by interest in their subject or
sympathy with their audience. The dread of making himself
ridiculous by stammering, by talking injudiciously, or making a
mistake of any kind, is so deeply ingrained in the mind of the
ordinary English gentleman that, if one—not a barrister or
clergyman, and consequently not inured to the sound of his own
voice—be called on suddenly to return thanks at a wedding-
breakfast, he will, nine times out of ten, stutter and hum-and-haw,
and, after putting every one on thorns, will end by making some
extraordinarily malapropos joke, like the celebrated one of Lord
Feenix in Dombey and Son. Or, if he be aware overnight that he will
be called on to address his own tenants on the morrow, his slumbers
will be considerably less sound than if he had been warned he must
go out and fight a duel at sixteen paces. As to an Englishman taking
kindly to public speaking when advanced in life, so miraculous an
event, I believe, is scarcely on record.
Nearly the contrary of all this holds true as regards women. Those
among them who are willing to speak in public seem to be carried
away the moment they begin by feelings which leave little room for
self-reflection, whatever pangs of shyness and diffidence they may
have endured beforehand.[34] But is it not very superfluous to
expatiate on the special gifts of speech assigned by nature to
womankind, since in all ages their proneness to over-exert them has
been the theme of jest and satire, and at no very remote date
hostelries were adorned by the sign of the “Good Woman,” meaning
a woman with no tongue; penal laws were in force against the
creature (now happily classified among the Extinct Mammalia), the
Common Scold; and even tombstones were enlivened by a sort of
dig at the sleeper beneath, as in the case of the celebrated Arabella
Young, whose death is specified as the date when she “began to
hold her tongue”? Perhaps it is not unjust to entertain the suspicion
that masculine wit may sometimes have proved rather tardy in
parrying the thrusts of that “little member,” which we all know is
sharpened in so terrible a furnace, and that the ponderous sarcasms
recorded against its misuse may be likened to the boulder-stones
thrown by Polyphemus after the retreating and exultant Greeks.
Joke or no joke, it is quite certain that women are even
exceptionally endowed with several, if not all, of the qualities
necessary to oratory. The originality and depth of their ideas and the
culture they have received may in many cases be open questions;
but there can be no doubt at all that, when they have got the ideas,
they will find out remarkably well how to express them.
It is time now to pass to the graver part of our subject,—the value
which may attach to women’s thoughts about Religion; for, if that
value be trifling, it will be all the more unfortunate, should they
possess any facilities for imposing them upon us by wordy fluency,—
that “fatal fluency” which the best men in America have deplored as
among the gifts of their countrymen.
Thoughts of the class which are properly expressed in pulpits are,
of course, of various kinds. There are thoughts which are purely
reflections and speculations of the intellect on critical and
philosophical problems, and which an able lawyer, an acute critic, or
a profound metaphysician can make as well, or better, than a
prophet or a saint; nay, in which a Mephistopheles might excel a
Tauler. It is no doubt sometimes necessary (though surely by no
means so frequently as some preachers seem to take for granted) to
offer thoughts of this class to a congregation, and, in short, to read
out in church an article which minus the text might have appeared in
a Review. If it be a very lofty and religious mind from which such
thoughts emanate, they will of course possess an elevating power
proportioned to the momentum of such a mind brought to bear on
ordinary intellects. To be lifted by sermons of this class into the
serene and purified atmosphere of noble speculation will of itself
effect a quasi-religious result, independently of any conviction of
theological truths which may or may not be brought away. The
hearers who have followed for half an hour the upward flight of one
of these eagle souls will return to the petty concerns, interests,
pleasures, anxieties of common life, calmed and ennobled, and able
to see all things in more just proportions. On the other hand, if the
preacher be merely a clever critic or metaphysician, who deals with
sacred themes as a counsel with the case in his brief, the result of
his sermons, however brilliant and interesting they may be found by
an intellectual audience, and triumphantly satisfactory to those who
find their cherished opinions clinched by his arguments, will be the
reverse of religious. The listeners will go away, not awed and
calmed, but eager for controversy and confirmed in self-confidence,
having lost any benefit which they might have derived from the
previous acts of worship. They have been made to rise from their
knees to sit down instantly in the seat of the critical, always very
closely contiguous to that of the scornful.
Of this intellectual and theoretical class of sermons it is not to be
anticipated that women will preach many. I should rather say that
one of the good things which may be hoped from the introduction of
women into the ministry may prove to be the falling out of fashion of
a class of discourses which can only be beneficial or desirable in the
case of exceptional mental greatness, combined with a piety warm
and powerful enough to hallow every region of thought into which it
may pass.
Again, there is an order of thought more practical than this, and
surely more suitable to form the sequel of a service of prayer;
namely, ideas concerning duty in all its forms, religious, social, and
personal. It is amazing, considering the place which Christianity in
every phase assigns to obedience to the will of God, how
exceedingly small a space lessons and discussions concerning what
is that Divine Will, as regards every-day conduct, ever take in
Christian instruction. We are eternally exhorted to repent; but what
are the sins and failures which ought to be included in our penitence,
few preachers take the pains to inform us. We are exhorted to
“renounce the devil and all his works”; but what those “works” may
be, as distinguished from works of righteousness in the shop, the
camp, the bar, the exchange, the interior of our homes, we are left to
find out for ourselves. Sermons treating carefully and thoughtfully
any subject of the kind are among the most rare of clerical
addresses. Bishop South confesses, indeed, that two-thirds of
Christianity are a Christian temper. But how many times have any of
us heard rebuked from the pulpit that odious sullenness which
makes the unhappy inmates of the same home with the sulky person
live in a perpetual November, or yet the despotic violence and anger
which threaten them like a perpetual thunder-storm brewing in the
distance? What master of a household is told, by the only man who
dare tell him, that his tyranny, his harshness, perhaps his cruelty,
exercised hourly on wife or child or any luckless dependant, make up
a sum total of misery to them and of offence on his part, worse than
the results of many a sudden crime, and certainly involving no less
guilt? What wife and mother is told that her selfishness, her
bickerings, her discontent, her spitefulnesses, are sins for which no
prate of high religious feeling or incessant fussing about church-
going can possibly atone? And, again, as regards other offences,—
let us say, lying and dishonesty,—when have we heard wise and just
definitions of them from our pastors, or fitting exhortations to nobler
standards of veracity and probity than are common in the world? In
the upper classes of society, a certain slipshod rule of thumb on
these subjects is pretty generally received. But where did we learn
it? Certainly not when we occupied our seats in church, but rather at
the dinner-table, in the playground at school, at the club, or in the
drawing-room. Among the lower ranks, where this traditional code, of
honor rather than of morality, does not hold equal sway, the
ignorance which prevails concerning the very rudimentary principles
of truth and probity is often no less startling than deplorable. The
neglect of the clergy of all denominations to draw clear definitions on
these matters of hourly concern, so that their flocks may at least
know what is right, supposing they are so fortunate as to be able to
inspire them with a resolution to do it when known, is of a piece with
the indifference of all the churches to moral heresies of the most
soul-debasing kind, while they punish to the utmost of their powers
the faintest divergence from theological orthodoxy.
I cannot but think that, if women now enter the pulpit, a great many
more sermons will be preached dealing with these points of practical
ethics. The concrete and the personal will probably always possess
keener interest for the majority of women than the abstract, the
vague and the universal; and there is, moreover, if I mistake not, a
very distinct superiority in the womanly propensity to translate ideas
into action, over the man-of-the-world habit of admitting high and
rigid principles in theory, while practising quite other rules in
commerce, politics, and social affairs. A very eminent thinker and
scholar, a leader of thought at Oxford, once remarked to me with
characteristic simplicity, “I do not know how to account for the fact,
but I notice that, when a good woman is convinced that something is
true or right, she tries immediately in some way to square her beliefs
and conduct accordingly; whereas when I have, perhaps by infinite
labor, succeeded in convincing a man of the same thing, he goes on
just as he did before, without altering his behavior a jot, and as if
nothing had happened!” Now, I think this practical tendency of the
feminine nature (though it will perhaps be less marked hereafter
when women submit more generally to the friction of contact with
many minds) will inevitably show itself in a preference for the
inculcation of definite duties rather than for the vague declamations
about repentance and regeneration which so often leave their
hearers perfectly undisturbed and on the high way (as they think) to
heaven, leading lives of odious selfishness, and combining profit and
piety after the fashion of the celebrated grocer, “Sand the sugar,
John—and then come in to prayers.”
It has been often remarked that the most profound difference
between modern and classical civilization lies in the contrast
between the value attached by each to private morals. The virtue of
the individual was of old treated as altogether subordinate in
importance to the interests of the State. In our time, we have almost
come to recognize that states and churches—nay, society itself—
exist for the sake of building up individual souls to their perfection;
and there is every reason to expect that this sense of the supreme
importance of morals over every other human concern will rather
increase than dwindle through all time to come.
Now, it would certainly appear that this Hebraism, as Mr. Arnold
calls it, is rather characteristic of the higher sort of women. The
moment a woman rises above the passion for personal admiration
and the struggle for petty social ambition or sordid matrimonial
scheming, to which so large a number of unhappy ones are trained
and consigned from girlhood, on the principle of “keeping women in
their proper sphere,”—the moment, I say, that a woman has been
lifted by education or her natural force of character above all this
frivolity and baseness, we almost invariably find in her a degree of
earnestness about ethical and ethico-religious questions which is far
more rarely traceable among men. It is true that her exclusion from a
great many fields of masculine interest naturally centres her thoughts
more on such subjects, and that, when those exclusions are more or
less removed, we must expect to see more frequently women
absorbed in the same worldly interests as men, and perhaps some
who now think night and day of a ball will be equally eager about a
bill in Parliament. Still, I believe that, independently of
circumstances, women have a special tendency (as Renan avers of
the Celtic race) to “long after the infinite,” and to yearn to bring an
element of sacredness and nobleness into the transactions of daily
life such as their moral aspect alone affords. I believe that nine
women out of ten (of the better sort, of whom I have spoken) would,
if they had the choice, oftener speak of duty and religion than of any
other themes.[35] If this be so, it would follow that, as time goes on,
instead of women falling behind in the progress of humanity, that
progress will constantly tend to bring women more to the front as
students and expounders of morality.
There is another aspect of this matter also, which fairly deserves
consideration. Many good Christians have remarked that, while they
would fain take Jesus Christ as their “Great Exemplar,” they find
nothing in his life indicating what his example would have been in the
very closest and most important of human relations of husband or
father. Surely there is no less reason for women to be conscious of a
lacune in their moral instructions, when they are received exclusively
either from mothers and governesses who may be utterly unfit for
such an office, and who often merely pass on traditional moral
heresies, or else from masculine pastors whose whole moral
parallax is necessarily different from that of a woman, and who
practically know next to nothing of the trials, temptations, and duties
of her lot. We have had of recent years in many of our churches, and
notably in St. Paul’s Cathedral, courses of sermons addressed by
various clergymen to men alone, from which women have been
rigidly excluded. Would it be too much to hope that some time or
other, in some humble chapel (since no one would dream of devoting
the national religious edifices to the exclusive use of women for a
single hour), women may enjoy the privilege of being especially
addressed by pastors of their own sex, who may talk to them at once
with cultured minds and experienced hearts?
And, lastly, besides the Intellectual and the Moral classes of
thoughts to be offered from the pulpit, there is a third,—of which,
alas! we know far too little,—the Spiritual. The store of this latter
class of thoughts is probably extremely small even in minds of
richest experience. They seem rather to distil slowly in precious
drops from the wounds in the tree of life than to be capable of
manufacture by the help of culture and reflection. They are the
thoughts which concern the baseness, the loathsomeness, the
misery of sin (felt and considered as Sin, not as Error or Vice), the
glory and beauty and joy of Holiness, felt as Holiness, not as
Prudence or Virtue. They teach the laws of our spiritual existence;
the hygienics of the soul; the “Way toward the Blessed Life.” In some
sense, sermons which contain thoughts like these may be called
Moral Discourses; for they touch the very springs of our moral
nature, and send us forth heart-smitten for the past, heart-
strengthened with resolutions for the future. They are the most
powerful moral levers which human agency ever applies to our
souls. But they are the reverse of didactic, ethical disquisitions, or
expositions of the detailed code of virtue. They lie in another region
of feeling and appeal to another class of our faculties than the
ratiocinative. We do not sit and judge them, but they come from
above and judge us. When they strike us most forcibly, we never feel
the temptation (as we are so often inclined to do at the best bits in
the critical or the moral discourse) to express our approbation by the
familiar tokens of public applause. On the contrary, it is our own
breasts we are fain to beat; while, if our lips move, it is to murmur the
prayer of the publican.
Will women preach sermons of this order and filled with thoughts
like these? It is impossible to foretell with certainty; yet here, if
anywhere, may we expect to find the special gifts of women brought
out at last from their hidden treasuries. It has been said of almost
every great spiritual teacher that there has been something feminine
in his nature, something more of tenderness and purity, more of
insight into and sympathy with others, than belongs to lesser men. In
Jesus Christ, the ideal characters of both sexes seem almost equally
blended. Of course there are other qualities besides the
characteristically feminine ones needed to form the highest kind of
religious teacher; but the sterner qualities are no more invariably
deficient in women than are the softer ones always lacking in men,
and it seems the reverse of improbable that women may arise
uniting both in hitherto almost unexampled degree. Let us remember
that, after all, the one great Force of the spiritual world—its
correlated Gravitation, Light, Electricity, Magnetism, and Vital Force,
all in one—is pure Divine Love. This alone, radiating from the Sun of
Love in the heavens, moves and vivifies the soul; and to it alone it
responds as the flower to the orb of day—we know not how. The
human spirit which receives from on high the largest influx of this
divine light and warmth thereby becomes a focus of reflected power
and fervor for all those who can be brought into spiritual contact with
it. It is the “love of God shed abroad” in the heart,—the love of that
goodness which God is, and for which man is made, whose germs
even now the illumined eye of love discerns deep-latent in every
human soul,—in a word, the love of God and love of man, in whose
might all spiritual miracles are done, all leprous souls cleansed, all
demon passions cast out, all blind eyes opened, all maimed and
crippled faculties made whole. If we could but find the most
profoundly-loving, the most unselfishly, nobly, purely loving of men or
women now living upon earth, and set him or her in the midst of us to
be our teacher, our friend, our guide into the ways of peace and
blessedness, we should have gained a help better than all the
philosophers and theologians, the monks and the hermits, could ever
give. I will not take on myself to affirm that such most loving heart
beats in a woman’s breast. It may well be that there are men as
tender in feeling as any mother whose spirit ever yearned over her
infant’s cradle. But there is at least an equal chance of a woman’s
supremacy, and almost a certainty that, on a secondary level of
loving-kindness and unselfishness, we should find many more
women than men. It is quite impossible, I think, that this difference
should not make itself felt, and a new impulse be made to flow
through all the channels of spiritual life whenever the influence of
women may be brought to bear directly and largely on the religious
feelings of the community.
Lastly, and chiefly. It is a truism to say that the character of our
religion depends on our idea of God; but who has taken note of this
familiar fact sufficiently to recognize that all the traditional part of that
solemn idea has come to us uniformly in a way deplorably one-
sided, and that side the least lovable? I do not overestimate the
importance of any idea of God which comes to us through our fellow-
men. It seems to me that, from the first dawn of the religious life, the
child has a dim sense (apart from his teacher’s lessons) of some
beneficent and righteous Power around and within him; and that
when the Sun rises on any soul in the awful hour which saints have
likened to a new birth, there is obtained, even through all the mists of
earth, a direct vision of the ineffable glory, which evermore causes
the words of other mortals, and even the man’s own attempt to
render in language his sense of that great Love and Holiness, to
seem unreal and worse than inadequate. When that stage is
reached, it is probably of little consequence what a man’s pastor
may tell him about God’s character. All he says is only like a book
which describes a person we ourselves have known or a place we
have visited. Nobody can make the man believe (at least so long as
his own living faith and open vision endure) that the Being whom he
meets in the hour of prayer is less than All-good, unutterably Holy,
even though the dogmas he accepts practically attribute to him a
totally different character. The only injury he can suffer is a negative
one: he is denied the help and sympathy which he needs, and which
it is the proper office of his minister to supply to him. But at an earlier
stage, when all religious experience is yet vague and dim, when faith
must of necessity be provisional and taken on trust at second hand,
—at that period there can be no question of the misfortune of
receiving cold, hard, narrow notions about God, instilled by teachers
who themselves have little love or no direct spiritual knowledge, and
have chiefly borrowed their ideas from the confessedly imperfect
rendering, age after age, of other men’s experience. How is a young
soul ever to turn to God, when God is represented to it as One from
whom it would far more naturally turn away? And let it be
remembered that the attributes of God which call out the
spontaneous love and adoration of the heart are precisely those
whose meaning is most completely lost and evaporated in the dry
formularies of the intellect, and can never be truly conveyed except
by one whose own heart responds to them through all its depths.
Power, Wisdom, Justice, are divine characteristics, of which the
meaning may be indicated by any teacher with a clear head and
command of language. But I disbelieve that any one who is not
himself full of love and tenderness has ever, since the world began,
yet transmitted to another soul the truth that God is Love.
There is little to wonder at, after all, in the mournful fact that the
religion which as it rose from the heart of Christ was supremely the
religion of Divine Love became, as the centuries went by, colder and
harder and more cruel, till the irony was complete, and the doctrine
of the Mount of Galilee was illustrated by the fires of the Spanish
Inquisition. Who, we may ask, were the teachers of Christianity
during the intervening ages? Who were they through whose lips and
writings the lessons gathered from the lilies and the sparrows, and
the story of the Prodigal, were transmitted to each new-born
generation? They were men, exclusively men; nay, men who, in
taking their office, renounced those ties of natural affection through
which the Author of Nature has caused the human heart to grow
tender, and to be taught the practice of unselfishness. To fit
themselves to convey to the hearts of their brethren the gospel of the
Fatherhood of God, they began by renouncing the experience of
human fatherhood for themselves. The Apostolic Succession, of
which the great Churches still boast, was for fifteen centuries a
school for the transmission of ideas about a Divine Parent down a
long chain of childless celibates. We Protestants have corrected this
mistake, and the men who tell to us the story of the Prodigal are at
least able to speak out of the abundance of their hearts when they
say that, “like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord hath mercy
on them that fear Him.” But is there not one step even further to be
taken? Is not the compassion of “a mother for the son of her womb”
a still profounder image of the Divine Love than the father’s pity?
Ought it not also to be brought home to our comprehensions (if in
any measure human words may so bring it) through the lips of
mothers and motherly-hearted women?
 The loss out of our religion of all those ideas which may be
classed as the doctrine of the motherhood of God has been attended
with evils innumerable. The Church of Rome, in obedience to a
vehement popular instinct, has sought to make up for the defect by
Mariolatry. The orthodox Protestant Churches, by sternly adhering to
their masculine Trinity, have indeed preserved the awe and moral
reverence which the Divine Kingship and Fatherhood demand, and
which the paganism of virgin worship has obliterated. But how much
have they not lost by excluding those sentiments which can only be
given to One in whom we recognize not only justice, holiness, and
beneficence, but also tenderness, sympathy, love? The truth is we
are so constituted that great benefits received,—if we think of them
as bestowed merely because it is right and good to give them, and
not from love for ourselves,—so far from awakening in us
spontaneous emotions of gratitude, have rather an opposite
tendency, and seem to lay on us an obligation to be grateful, which is
a sort of burden, and from which all minds save the most generous
have a proclivity to escape. To hundreds of us, large donations from
just and well-meaning but unaffectionate fathers have failed to
waken the smallest throb of genuine gratefulness; while some mere
trifle given by a loving mother—a flower from a well-remembered
rose-tree, a scrap of her needlework—has filled our eyes with tears.
In excluding, then, in a great degree from view that which I may
presume to call the maternal side of religion, the Churches, so far as
they have done it, have dropped the golden chain whereby human
hearts may be drawn, and have kept in their hands the iron one
which can only control the reason and the conscience. Is it possible
to estimate the amount of loss to religion which this signifies, or how
many thousands of souls might have been won by love to a life of
piety and holiness who have refused to obey the bit and bridle of
sterner motives, and have wandered off and been lost in the
wilderness of practical atheism?
If there be, then, as I humbly believe and trust, in the nature of our
great Parent above, certain characters of tenderness and sympathy
with His creatures which are more perfectly shadowed, more vividly
reflected, in the love of human mothers for their children than by
aught else on earth; if there be, in short, a real meaning in the old
lesson that God created woman as well as man in His own image,—
the image being only complete in the complete humanity,—then I
think it follows that there is urgent need that woman’s idea of God
should have its due place in all our teaching of religion. I think that
there must be truths in this direction which only a woman’s heart will
conceive and only a woman’s lips can teach,—truths, perchance,
which have come to her when baby-fingers have clung round her
neck in the dark while infant trust overcame infant terror, and she
has asked herself was there anything in heaven or earth which could
make her cast down to destruction, or even let slip from her clasp of
care and guardianship, the helpless little child thus lying in her arms,
—a living parable of all our race in the everlasting arms of God.

FOOTNOTES:
[27] It will be seen that I differ toto caelo on this point from
Mr. Mahaffy in his interesting recent essay on the Decay of
Preaching. He seems to me only to recognize the moral and
intellectual forces which move men, and these compared with
the spiritual are only what mechanical ones are to the electric.
[28] Ingoldsby’s rendering of this world-famous story, the
favorite theme of so many eminent painters, is probably no
very exaggerated reading of the general impression of the
monastic mind respecting the fair sex:—
“There are many devils which walk this world,
Devils great and devils small,
Devils short and devils tall;
Bold devils which go with their tails unfurled,
Sly devils which carry them quite upcurled;

But a laughing woman with two bright eyes

Is the worsest devil of all!”
[29] I know not on what authority the familiar jovial couplet
has been attributed to the great Reformer:—
 “Wer liebt nicht Wein, Weib, und Gesang
Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang.”
The ascetic spirit had very far departed, at all events, from
the author who composed it.
[30] I. Cor. xiv., 26. If this graphic description had applied to
a female assembly, should we have ever been allowed to
forget the circumstance?
[31] “The Hebrew Woman,” by Constance de Rothschild
(Mrs. Cyril Flower).
[32] A sermon by this lady on “The Sacrament of Life,”
preached and printed at Melbourne, would amply justify, I
think, to every reader the above remark.
[33] In the case of the M.P., this would need to be a majority
of men, seeing that the whole female contingent of qualified
voters will only (if admitted) add about a fifth or sixth to the
register.
[34] This at least is the impression left on me by the female
speakers (some twenty perhaps) whom I have chanced to
hear. I never knew one of them “hum” or “haw,” or stammer,
or break down, even when (as in one very remarkable case)
the gentle and learned speaker had never addressed an
audience till the occasion, when she had already passed
middle life. Among the most remarkable phenomena of the
present day, I reckon the preaching of Mrs. Booth, the wife of
the General of the Salvation Army. The combination of fervent
zeal with practical good sense in her extempore discourses
must be admired even by those who differ most widely from
her views.
[35] A curious illustration of this is to be found in a passage
in the first series of Mrs. Kemble’s charming autobiography
published three years ago. She describes the late Lady Byron
as often expressing envy of her (Mrs. Kemble’s) public
readings, and her longing to have similar crowds in sympathy
with her own impressions. “I made her laugh,” says Mrs.
Kemble, “by telling her that more than once, when looking
from my reading-desk over the sea of faces uplifted toward
me, a sudden feeling had seized me that I must say
something from myself to all those human beings whose
attention I felt at that moment entirely at my command, and
between whom and myself a sense of sympathy thrilled
powerfully and strangely through my heart as I looked
steadfastly at them before opening my lips; but that on
wondering afterwards what I might, could, would, or should
have said to them from myself, I never could think of anything
but two words—‘Be good!’” (Page 317.)
 THE HOUSE ON THE SHORE OF
ETERNITY.

AN ALLEGORY.

Two simple-minded men, who had dwelt all their lives in a country
far inland, at last undertook a long journey together. This happened
many ages ago, when there were no such things as printed books or
village schools, and when the people in isolated districts saw no
travellers, and knew nothing of the great world beyond the hills which
closed their horizon.
Wolfgang and Athelstane, so our pilgrims were called, walked on
over downs and heaths, and through the vast forests of oak which
then overspread the land, till at last, after a night’s toilsome march,
they came, in the early dawn, to a spot which seemed to them the
strangest they had ever visited. Walls of rock shut out any distant
view; but immediately before them on a gentle declivity there stood a
structure, much larger than the humble cottages which Wolfgang and
Athelstane had inhabited, and of a singularly different form. Instead
of a pointed roof of thatch or tiles, there was, on the top, a flat floor of
boards; while beneath, where there should have been a solid square
foundation, there was a long thin wedge, almost like a roof which
had been reversed and turned downward. Also, through the floor
rose up two long, slender, tree-like erections, with all the branches
carefully smoothed away. Crossbars were slung on these poles, and
ropes connected them together; while a great roll of coarse woven
stuff, like sackcloth, lay folded up beside them. At one end, and
outside of the wooden structure, hung a huge beam, standing, as it
seemed, in some unaccountable relation to the rest of the fabric, and
connected with it by machinery passing into the interior. All these
singular things were slowly and carefully noted by our two humble
travellers, as they walked round the wooden building in the morning
twilight. No one was near who could afford them an explanation of
the use or purpose of what they saw; and their doubts and wonder
grew every moment.
“What can it mean?” said Wolfgang. “What did the builder—
whoever he can have been—intend by such a mansion as this?”
“It is clear enough,” answered Athelstane, thoughtfully, “that it is
the work of some very ingenious hands. How soundly and skilfully it
is all fitted together!”
“True,” replied his comrade; “and yet ought we to say it is well
made before we can tell for what purpose it is constructed? To me it
seems that our own old huts of wattled willow and turf were, after all,
of a better shape for a house to stand on the ground.”
“Do you think this is a house, only a house?” said Athelstane,
suddenly looking up.
“Well, if it be not a house, what else can it be?” said Wolfgang.
“Let us try to look inside of it, and examine it more closely.”
The two men soon contrived to enter the edifice which so puzzled
them; and presently Wolfgang exclaimed triumphantly:—
“See! there can be no question more on the matter. This is only a
house. Here are seats and tables for men to sit at, and beds for them
to sleep in; and here is a fire-place and a great iron pot to cook food.
Now, you can have no hesitation. It is just a wooden house, and
rather stupidly planned.”
“I have no doubt,” said Athelstane, “that it is intended for a
habitation; but is it not inexplicable that a builder who can work so
cleverly should construct it so unsuitably for a common house? Why
is it not made to stand squarely and steadily on the ground? What is
the sense of these long soaring poles standing up through the
middle, with the coils of ropes and bales of sacking? And this? This
is the most mysterious thing of all,” said Athelstane, placing his hand
on a wheel, which instantly stirred the great beam at the back.
 “They are strange certainly,” replied Wolfgang,—“very strange and
useless things, I should say, about a house which would be much
more comfortable and answer its purpose better without them. I
cannot agree with you that the builder was really a clever man, or
knew what he was about, else he would never have erected those
poles or made that senseless, upside-down roof, instead of a
foundation; or, above all, have constructed that totally unmeaning
apparatus behind the whole structure.”
“I differ from you,” said Athelstane, after some moments more of
reflection. “I think it is we who are not clever or ingenious, and who
cannot find out what the carpenter who made this building intends to
do with it. I do not believe that singular form beneath (so little fit for a
building only intended for a house), nor those poles and ropes and
vast sheets of woven stuff, nor yet that mysterious great beam, were
all added to a mere house for nothing,—for no purpose whatever. I
think, Wolfgang,” and Athelstane laid his hand on his friend’s arm
earnestly,—“I think what we are looking at is something more than a
house. I think it is not intended to stand always where we see it.”
“You are dreaming, Athelstane,” said Wolfgang, with a short laugh.
“Where on earth should a house go, if it is not to stand always where
it is built? Who would want to move such a structure as this?”
“I do not know,” said Athelstane, humbly. “I do not profess to
understand the mystery of it: only I see that the master carpenter
who built it must have been a very great carpenter indeed; and I
cannot believe that he has made all these things in vain, or for no
important purpose. If he wanted only a house, why did he not simply
build a house standing flat on the ground, and with no shafts piercing
the air, and no vast guiding beam at the back? Trust me, friend
Wolfgang, this is something more than the common abode of which
alone you seem able to think.”
While the two simple-minded men yet talked together, the sun had
risen, and there was a sound of many waters and of rising waves;
and through an opening in the rocks, which the travellers had not
perceived in the twilight, the great ocean became revealed to their
eyes. Higher and higher rose the tide, till it almost reached where the
strange wooden building still lay motionless; and the travellers
retreated a little up the shore, and stood, awe-struck and breathless,
watching what might happen. Then down from the cliff above ran a
band of mariners, and leaped on board the vessel, and hauled in the
anchor; and presently the waves lifted up the ship, and she floated
bravely on the waters. Very soon, the mariners set the sails, which
had lain idly on the deck, the pilot placed his hand on the rudder and
guided the noble barque, and she was borne by the winds of heaven
far off beyond the uttermost ken of the two poor travellers upon the
shore.
Then, after a time, Wolfgang turned to his companion, and said:
“Athelstane, you spoke truth. Yon House-of-the-Sea was made, as
you foresaw, for other use than to stand upon the ground. It was
planned for a different element,—the free world of waters. And now
we see what was the purport of so many things which before
seemed to us useless,—the keel, the masts, the sails, the
marvellous and mysterious rudder. How wonderful it is! How wise
and far-seeing the great carpenter who made the ship!”
As Wolfgang spoke, Athelstane lifted his head, which had drooped
in heavy thought, and he saw the wide ocean leaping in the morning
light stretched out before him, and the new-risen sun smote his face
with glory. And Athelstane laid his hand on Wolfgang’s arm, and
spoke as his friend had never heard him speak before, for it was as
a man in whose soul a great new thought had sprung to life: “Aye,
Wolfgang, aye,” he said; “but if that marvellous work of human hands
was not made only for earth, do you think we were made for nothing
better than the life which now we lead,—to eat and drink, and marry,
and toil, and sleep, and die, and be forgotten? Are not we too, O
Wolfgang, made for other things than these? Are we not fitted for
some other element than that in which now we have our being, some
other existence than that which yet we lead? If we were intended
only to live our few years of animal life on earth and then perish, why
were we given minds to plough the seas of thought, and aspirations
to point to heaven, and love to swell beneath the breath of affection,
and conscience to guide us on our way as the pilot lays on it his
mighty hand? O Wolfgang! we could perceive that the ship was
intended to float on the great ocean which we had never beheld. Can
we not see that we and all our race are made to live in a world yet
unseen, wider, freer, grander a thousand times than earth,—a world
which we shall enter whensoever the tide of death shall lift us up and
bear us away?”